


Carousel

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Alternate Universe - Non-Despair (Dangan Ronpa), Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Parental Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-10
Updated: 2018-10-10
Packaged: 2019-07-28 21:29:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16250153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Nagito visits a carousel on the anniversary of his parents’ death. Hajime joins him, with breakfast pastries.This was written for the Komahina Secret Exchange on tumblr, as a gift for tumblr user cactuplant!  :D  It’s for her prompt “wintertime and angst.”





	Carousel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cactuplant](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=cactuplant).



> Hi!! This is the first out of three stories I wrote for tumblr user cactuplant – I’ll be posting the other two soon, I just didn’t wanna flood the tag all on one day. I hope you enjoy this if you read it! I had a lot of fun with all cactuplant’s prompts. Happy Komahina Exchange Time, everybody!

None of the carnival rides would be running, that day – Nagito Komaeda knew that for sure, because it had snowed so horribly the night before.  The streets were like woven-together skating rinks, right about now; the trees were huddled under piles of snow just waiting to get shaken off and probably right down the back of somebody’s coat.

Nagito was going to the carnival anyway, though.  He figured maybe he’d bring a thermos with lemon-y tea or something to balance between his gloved palms.  He’d wear sweaters under his coat, too, and a couple pairs of socks, and he would text his boyfriend Hajime about where he was going with an extra effort to seem upbeat and _not_ like this trip to the closed-up carnival should be seen as weird or worrying at all.  It’d be good if somebody knew where Nagito was, to be honest, in case he slipped down a hidden flight of stairs or got cracked on the head by a tree branch splintered apart under the weight of the snow.

Nagito’s luck was _like that_ , after all.  He’d been having a pretty decent week so far, so the universe was probably scheming to give him the kind of frostbite that would end in a couple lost toes, or – far worse, always far worse – send a spiraling-out car to hit Hajime’s or something…  If _that_ happened today of all days, there would have been a certain awful poetry about it.  Nagito’s hands had trembled like he was freezing when he realized it, and he’d wrapped his arms around himself for a second.  Breathing slowly, closing his eyes.

The heavy pain in his chest hadn’t quite faded, yet, and the spinning in his head felt like it was going to last forever.  Nagito was heading off to sit on a bench closest to the carnival’s deathly-still, iced-over carousel, after all.  Trying to summon his parents back to mind as well as he knew how.  It felt appropriate to do _something_ like that, now, on the day they’d died…  Struck down by his strange and impossible luck.  One of the warmest memories Nagito had of his parents featured a carousel not too different from the one at the carnival around that city, so it had made a sort of sense.  Having such a similar carousel close by was lucky, right?  Nagito would have to look at the carousel through the carnival’s stern wrought iron fence, but that was okay.

_“Be careful today,”_ Nagito texted to Hajime, leaning against his front door, steadying himself.  Then he sent a couple hearts.  Not too many – too many might have made Hajime feel awkward.  Nagito knew he could be a lot, sometimes.  People had told him that ever since he was a child.  Classmates taking unbidden steps backwards and away from him as he spoke; doctors chuckling nervously and excusing themselves in the middle of consultations.  But Hajime told Nagito not to worry so much over what they talked about, while they hung out.  Not to beat himself up, if he could help it; not to obsess over whether he could ever truly be enough.  Hajime worried about that sort of thing for his own self, too, though.  Constantly trying to leave his mark on the world, constantly trying to genuinely _excel_ at something in a way that would make him feel whole…  They were cut from the same cloth, really, the two of them.

That had been one of the first things Nagito had said to Hajime, back when they first met, honestly.  Hajime had studied him for a second, then…  Skeptical and chewing a little on the inside of his cheek.  He hadn’t known what to say, at first, and in retrospect Nagito should’ve expected that.

But now…  Now, heading out into the cold, Nagito reminded himself that everything would end up lucky in the end.  Of course.  Whatever happened in all that city, on all that grim, frozen day, it would turn out shiny for him somehow.  Lucky, even if whatever happened still made him feel queasy years and years into the future…  Lucky, even if he was alone again, in a world where none of his family members had been willing to pay his ransom back when he was being held hostage as a kid.  Of course.

(Nagito wasn’t sure how completely he believed that he could swallow down that sort of “luck,” anymore.  He reminded himself, and he reminded himself, but the mantra wasn’t the same now that it felt like he had something to lose.)

Hajime actually met Nagito partway to the carnival, striding recklessly over the icy sidewalk and wearing mittens their friend Chiaki had gotten him, stitched with references to a game they liked.  His breath was a cloud of fog around him; a bag of breakfast-y foods was swinging loosely in his hand.  Some sort of pastries and buttery, still-warm croissants he’d picked up from the bakery by his apartment building.  It was as if Hajime had known Nagito would forget to eat.  He’d parked his car a little ways away, too – Nagito wouldn’t want to ride in it that day, anyway.

Not with this ice; not with Hajime behind the wheel, all fragile, too-human bones and warm, beating heart.  These weren’t the sort of roads where Nagito would be okay with Hajime holding his arm, or even standing too close to him, really.  They’d known each other long enough that Nagito probably didn’t have to say anything about his luck rubbing off onto people he cared about, like powdered sugar from a pastry getting all over somebody’s hands.

“Wait up a sec!” Hajime called.  “Your text didn’t leave me a lot of time to get ready, you know.”

“You didn’t have to come,” Nagito said, when Hajime got close enough to hear.  His voice came out low and strange, unintentional as his poisonous, too-loud laughter.  That laughing bubbled up when Nagito was terrified, sometimes.  In the doctor’s office, staring down at the results of a recent brain scan; as a child on an airplane, watching his parents get struck by an actual meteor out of an otherwise meteor-less sky.  That laughter came when Nagito was baffled, and all explanations felt like snow melting into his skin, gone and gone and gone.  Hajime had definitely heard him laugh like that before, but he still flinched, sometimes, when it happened.  That sort of thing was difficult to help.

They walked, then, the rest of the way to the carnival.  At one point Nagito’s boot got caught in a mysterious hole and came off…  Only to promptly get carried away by somebody’s frolicking dog.  Ah, well.  If that was the price he’d have to pay for the food Hajime had brought him – or the basic fact that he didn’t have to be alone that day – it wasn’t too bad.  Nagito had been conditioned to expect far, far worse.

By the time Hajime and Nagito both failed to rescue his boot from the dog _and_ rounded up another boot that sort of fit, a slithering fog had wound through those streets.  Making their way through it got Nagito thinking of memory, a bit.  It blurred the edges of everything, after all, making streetlights seem ghostly and Hajime feel a lot farther away than he actually was.  Nagito would have wanted to hold hands, maybe, except that his mind kept throwing him images of Hajime bent apart and splattered open and lost, somehow.  Lost because Hajime dared to be close to him.

Those images came all the time – whenever Nagito began to relax, whenever his smiles felt so honest they made him realize when he was faking nonchalant.  When he was faking _happy_.  Nagito had warned Hajime that it wasn’t a good idea to date him, but Hajime was the sort to take challenges that mattered to him, wasn’t he?  He was probably the kind of person who would want to ride rollercoasters, too, or plummet down laugh-screaming from the Tower of Doom…  If he’d been going to the carnival with a different kind of boyfriend, that is, or if Nagito didn’t carry his impossible, clutching luck around everywhere.  As close as his own soul – maybe closer.

If Hope’s Peak Academy had stayed open just a _bit_ longer, maybe Nagito would have found something like purpose, there.  He’d gotten an invitation, after all, and then he’d gotten another far more adamant invitation when he turned the first one down because it didn’t feel like he could possibly be worthy.  And now…  Well, Nagito _knew_ he would have lived out past the early death his doctors had expected for him.  He would’ve lived long enough to graduate, even, surrounded all the time by what he knew as humanity’s radiant symbols of hope!  But then, you know…  Then there was all that evidence found, with school higher-ups and their student-experimentation schemes.  Attempts to create artificial talent; attempts to exchange breathing people for so much potential glory, meanwhile breaking dozens of laws Nagito had never heard of.  The place was shut down and defamed, which that mysterious detective who had leaked the information to all the right people _insisted_ was for the best.

They said Hope’s Peak Academy had been sowing the seeds of a great despair, a despair that would be overgrown and strangling, soon, if left to its own devices.  They said it like they knew for sure how it would all happen.  Everything that – apparently? – would be lost.

Hm.

Nagito wondered sometimes if he should blame his own luck for the loss of Hope’s Peak, at least a little.  He _had_ been trapped in a stopped train car with Hajime Hinata for a few hours on the week that school shut down.  He hadn’t even managed to accidentally scare Hajime off in that stopped car, either, with his whispers of hope and wonder, of a happy ending to come no matter what.  He’d ended up with Hajime’s number, actually, after the train doors opened and it was revealed they were probably not truly going to die that day.  Nagito had never been given anybody’s number so on-purpose and casually before, but they’d just been through an interesting day together.  The train tracks had been flooding, see, with cold oily water from deep under the world.  Nagito had imagined Hajime drowned before he even once imagined kissing him.

When they got to the carnival’s gate, Hajime was telling Nagito about something weird that had happened in his university class – something involving his classmate Gundham Tanaka and a hamster that could fill out busywork assignments for him.  They sat on the bench, just as Nagito had planned to.  They passed his thermos of lemon tea back and forth, and Hajime cracked open that crinkly bag of pastries.

Maybe soon, Nagito and Hajime would live together and eat breakfast in the same space nearly every day.  If Nagito could work up the nerve to draw Hajime in even closer like that – if Hajime was willing to risk such tumultuous, taunting luck in his own actual home.  Sometimes Nagito wondered if he’d ever be able to ask him to do a thing like that.  Whatever price Hajime paid to keep him close, it felt like the universe would keep asking him to pay more and more.  Twisted ankles, colds that lasted months and exploded all over new employers, broken wrists...  More and more, more and more, until eventually Hajime would have to get sick of it, right?  That was what Nagito told himself, anyway, more often than Hajime knew.

They sat in silence for a minute, next, watching the carousel under the snow.  Icicles dangled from the horse’s hooves, looking sort of like something in a fairy tale.  Every jewel-bright painted eye had been smoothed over by frost…  Hidden, now.  All horses became like one, when the winter came for them and the ride was deathly still.  No jaunty carnival music, no cloying cotton candy smell in the air.  Nothing but this.

Hajime asked, “Hey, do you wanna talk about them?” and it took Nagito a breath to realize what he meant.  His parents.  Did he want to talk about his parents, whatever sort of people they would’ve been before they died?

“I don’t know,” Nagito answered honestly.  “I’m not sure where I’d even begin, right now.”

“Uh, well…”  Hajime stretched, arms tossed over his head, pastry bag balanced precariously on his lap.  His smile was sad, Nagito thought.  “Sometimes I wonder if they were stubborn, like you…  Or if their senses of humor were anything like yours…  Stuff like that, I guess.”

Before Nagito knew it, he was squeezing Hajime’s hand so tightly it might have accidentally hurt him.  He was saying, oh, he didn’t know for sure, but he thought maybe so…  He was talking about how his mother had fought with the posh elementary school teacher when she’d tried to say Nagito didn’t belong in her classroom…  He was talking about all the vague knickknacks he remembered from his father’s study, huge and mythic and like something out of a dream, now.  He couldn’t be sure they were even real, through all the creeping fog of memory.  Nagito was talking about that one day with his parents at the amusement park, on the carousel, and how it was one of those true, bright things he held tight to keep warm, like the thermos pressed against his chest.

Nagito didn’t know if his parents would have been able to sit through horror movies without getting scared, the way he did…  And he didn’t know whether his parents would’ve taken Hajime out for lunch, or helped Nagito figure out what sort of anniversary gifts weren’t “too much” now that he actually had a boyfriend who wanted to stick with him long enough to have actual anniversaries.  He _wanted to know_ , though.  He would always want to know, no matter how hard he tried not to think about it.  Nagito had always tried to focus on the final soaring-up luck of it all, reminding himself that things would end up sunny in time – but now they were watching the carousel and it was buried under so much cold.  Now, his boyfriend was rubbing his back, and the tears threatening at the edges of his eyes were freezing themselves to his skin.

Why did Nagito have to imagine Hajime dead so many times, day after day?  Could they ever actually have a home…  _Could Nagito have a family again_ …  Without it ending in death, and more relics – relics of Hajime, this time, that he’d wind up visiting in the cold?

Hajime didn’t have a certain answer for any of that…  But then, he truly, honestly shouldn’t have had to.  He murmured something about how they could only really try for that future – something about safe spaces and taking care of themselves, about getting carnival tickets again when spring came.  Hajime brushed a little frost off Nagito’s hair, so gently Nagito almost couldn’t accept this as his truth.  His life.  Something truly devastating had to be coming for him, now that Hajime was letting him kiss his forehead, there, and coaxing him into warmer, hopeful words.

The snow fell all around them, harder and harder, until it was coming down so fast they could barely see the carousel at all anymore and it was time – _no excuses!_ – to go home.


End file.
